Lunch Talk by Alec Karakatsanis – “Body Cameras, Copaganda, and the Fraud of ‘Police Reform’”

The United States has the largest bureaucracy of policing, prosecution, and prisons in world history. Most people would prefer a society with less government surveillance, less violence by employees of the state, and less waste of public resources.  And yet they all keep increasing.  They all keep growing despite decades of “reform.”  Alec will argue that they all keep expanding in part because of these “reforms.”

The kinds of “reforms” pursued by punishment bureaucrats get well-intentioned people who lack substantial relevant knowledge but who feel bad about overt state violence to support policies that do not challenge the size, power, or profits of the punishment bureaucracy.

Alec will focus on the case study of the police body camera to show how the police bureaucracy used its own violence as the perfect alibi to get well-meaning people who lacked sufficient information to support greater police procurement budgets, more advanced and efficient technologies of control and incarceration, an explosion of profit for a small group of companies, and an expansion of the capacity of the government to watch us. And most remarkably: All of it happened under the guise of making the police bureaucracy more “accountable” and “transparent.”

Alec is the Founder of Civil Rights Corps. Before founding Civil Rights Corps, Alec was a civil rights lawyer and public defender with the Special Litigation Division of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia; a federal public defender in Alabama, representing impoverished people accused of federal crimes; and co-founder of the non-profit organization Equal Justice Under Law.

Learn more here.